OBE: ...Whose Community?
In her “Whose Culture? Whose City?” Sharon Zukin discusses how public space drives cultural consumption, i.e., the subscription to and use of cultural artifacts. Her main concern is that often “public space” is controlled privately, be it by stewardship or ownership. Zukin thinks that the “culture industry,” and its attendant symbolic economy, are conflated with micro-constructed public culture. This is often done intentionally as a marketing schema; Zukin cites the idea of social strain and the need for justice being absorbed and reframed to represent a need for a particular product. Basically, the mechanism behind this is that if public space is the stage upon which we form our culture, and to a degree our collective identities, then areas that are presented as public but are actually controlled semi-privately are loci for artificial culture, i.e. cultural consumption, cultural control, etc. This is based on the fact that the private controllers can decide who can use the space, when, and in what capacity, i.e., artificially shape the public.
Zukin’s ideas about cultural production are interesting to me because they somewhat connect with my paper topic. My topic is about the conjunction of gay neighborhoods, i.e. geographic areas, and the gay community, i.e. the totality of gay people in an area. This idea as it is painted by Zukin as somewhat nefarious, but the principles behind it can help to explain how the gay community settles into a gay neighborhood. Because homosexuality is a target identity, i.e. an identity which is often under scrutiny and brings the user persecution, it is more prone to creating collective identity. This collective identity is in turn especially salient to individual gay men, and after a legacy of exclusion and prejudice, any hint of inclusion and acceptance is particularly noticeable. Gay bars are an example of artifacts of Zukin’s culture industry. Gay bars are created to echo the aspects of the collective identity, i.e., gay sub-culture, that resonate in gay men, effectively saying “you are included here, you are wanted here, and you are part of here.” This subculture has been adopted by the private proprietors of the bar and fed to gay culture consumers.